Random Recent Recipes, and Rediscovering Podcasts

Mid-March is here, along with daylight savings time, and the seasons are fluctuating on a daily basis. You have to check the weather app before you get dressed in the morning. The last few weeks went by in a blur of routine life, but today I had the urge to jot down a few random highlights here. Recent recipes I've been making have had diverse inspirations, from my grandmothers to viral tiktok recipes. 

The first recipe came about from a surplus of chana dal in my pantry. While I keep a selection of dals and beans on hand, some are used more than others. Chana dal is a fairly minor player. But the last time I went to restock toor dal (which is the daily dal in Maharashtrian kitchens), I accidentally bought a big bag of chana dal instead. How does one make such a mistake after accruing decades of cooking experience? I cannot say. However, I have been making an effort to use it up. 

Inspired by my maternal grandmother: I suddenly remembered that my maternal grandma (a big meat eater) would make a rather elaborate meatball pulao with layers of chana dal and yogurt and fried onions. Where did she learn such a recipe, I wonder?

I had a bag of Aldi meatless meatballs in the freezer, so I used this as an inspiration for a quick weekday pulao made entirely in the instant pot.

• Soak 3/4 cup chana dal for several hours
• Soak 3/4 basmati rice for 1 hour
• Thaw about 20 meatless meatballs
• In the instant pot insert, heat some oil and saute onions until browned
• Add ginger, garlic, turmeric, salt, chili powder, garam masala, coriander-cumin powder
• Turn off saute mode
• Add 2- 2.5 cups water
• Add the drained rice and chana dal and mix it in
• Top with meatballs
• Pressure cook on high for 4 minutes
• 10 minutes natural release

Whole spices would have made this simple pulao even better. It was great for dinner and for the lunchbox the following day! 

* * *

eggplant kaap

My paternal grandmother was Konkani and while she had mostly retired from cooking duties by the time I was old enough to remember, I still associate her with certain dishes. One of these is the simple vegetable side dish called kaap. The word means "cut" and refers to vegetables cut into slices, coated with simple seasonings, and pan-fried. 

Recently I made some kaap with eggplant and butternut squash. These are so excellent with some dal and rice. True comfort food.

• Cut veggies into uniform medium slices

• 

  butternut squash kaap

  Sprinkle with salt, turmeric, and red chili powder
• Set aside for 20 minutes to draw out the juices
• Dredge each slice in rice flour
• Pan-fry or roast in the air fryer with oil spray on each side
• Serve right away

* * *

This next dish was inspired by a tiktok viral recipe, of all things. I don't use tiktok but someone posted it on Reddit where it caught my eye. The original viral recipe (someone has posted it on a blog, which I used as a reference) is for a dumpling bake. 

You mix coconut milk, Thai curry paste, and seasoning into a curry base in a baking dish, top it with bok choy and frozen dumplings and bake everything together. When I tried it, I mixed the sauce ingredients in the baking dish and thought I would add some tofu too, to make it heartier. By the time I added the tofu and bok choy, there was no space left for the dumplings! The tofu curry turned out great. Thinking about it...stovetop curry wouldn't take any more time to make and would be just as easy. Basically, the combination of coconut milk and canned curry paste is the key to a quick and tasty curry, no matter how you cook it. Oh well! 

Thai curry with quinoa

* * * 

macarons

Junior Baker: My daughter has been more interested in baking lately. Last weekend she pulled up the recipe for brookies from Preppy Kitchen. These are half-brownie, half-cookie bars and they were excellent. She took a container full to share with her friends at the lunch table. This weekend, she pulled up the recipe for cinnamon roll bites from Recipe Rebel. It is an easy, buttery baking powder leavened biscuit dough baked up in bite size balls rolled in cinnamon sugar. It is fun to see her trying out some new recipes. 

Speaking of the joy of sharing treats, in the little kitchenette in my office, people occasionally place treats to share. Last week, my colleague brought in macarons made by his wife. It was her first time trying them and this was apparently the third attempt of the weekend. She was determined to get them right. They were fantastic, some of the best macarons I have ever tasted. The filling is orange white chocolate. I've never made macarons- they are something of a baking bucket list item for me. 

* * *

Reading--

• Claire Keegan's slim book of three short stories (published in 2023)- So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men. She writes so beautifully. The stories are great, if rather bleak and disturbing. They all center around gender dynamics. 
• George Takei's graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy. I spotted this on a library display table the other day, where librarians curate small collections based on a theme. Takei is best known from the original cast of Star Trek, famous enough that even I am familiar with him (I'm a Star Wars gal myself.) It is a beautiful and informative memoir about Takei's four childhood years in a Japanese internment camp around WWII. This was published in 2019 but is highly relevant today.
• Yet another of the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli's books, The Order of Time, published in 2017. Just like his other books, it is full of mind-bending ideas. It is a short book but I am working my way through it slowly. 
• A Philosophy Break article on living when the world feels broken. It asks a very pertinent question, "How can we joyfully go about our days, with so much strife in the wider world?" 

* * *

Walking is Back on the Agenda: On the fitness front, I try to go jogging 2-3 times a week in addition to my routine strength training. It has to be within the 6 am- 7 am time slot because, after that, work and kids take over the day. 

In the last couple of months, the jogging hasn't worked out so well. I'm just full of excuses- it is too dark, it is too cold, it is too dark and too cold, it is raining, it was raining and the ground is wet and I'm afraid of slipping, my feet hurt...endless reasons to avoid running, and then barely walking during the day. I do HIIT workouts at home on some of jogging days, but on the whole, I've been feeling exceptionally sedentary.

Recently, I stopped the internal debate of taking myself out for a run, and decided to walk more during the day. I've been walking 10,000 steps every day. There's a lot of ink spilled about how this is a totally arbitrary number, a marketing gimmick, nothing magical about it, etc. True enough. But it also happens to be a nice round number that is an achievable goal for me. While walking does not bump up the heart rate enough to qualify as vigorous cardio (and I will have to work in better cardio workouts or rekindle the joy of running), it is a great way to feel more active on a daily basis. 

Walking 10 minutes is about 1,000 steps. Routine life gives me 3,500 steps a day on average. That leaves about an hour and 15 minutes of additional walking. Depending on the day, I walk during my lunch break at work or take an after dinner stroll. On occasion, when I don't have to pick up one of the kids from school, I walk to work and back (2 miles each way.) I've even used some random walking workouts on YouTube on rainy days.

Rediscovering Podcasts: Now that I'm walking more regularly, I've been listening to podcasts again, after many years of not doing so on a regular basis. My favorite new podcast is one about my favorite new hobby- sewing. It is the Love to Sew podcast hosted by two women, one own a fabric shop and the other is a pattern designer. These are a few of their episodes that I've enjoyed so far:

• If you could only sew one thing: A fun episode with lots of ideas on favorite patterns, fabrics, types of projects.
• Interview with Patrick Grant: As a fan of the sewing bee show, I loved this episode with one of the judges. When I sit at my sewing machine, I swear I hear Patrick and Esme judging my work. More than once, I've thought to myself, Patrick and Esme won't like this wonky seam, and taken it apart to redo. 
• Block prints: I was overjoyed when they devoted an entire episode to the fabric that I've very nearly obsessed with.
• Sewing quick wins: Another fun episode with lots of ideas for quick and simple projects. 

A couple of other podcast episodes I've enjoyed:

• You're Wrong About is a podcast where a journalist revisits a misunderstood person or event and tries to straighten the facts. I highly recommend the episode called Flight 571: Survival in the Andes. It covers the same survival story that I read about in the book Miracle in the Andes (I talk about the book in this post.) It is a riveting story and this podcast covers it with great empathy. 
• Reply All is a podcast about modern life, centering around the Internet.  I listened to a two-part episode called Long Distance (#102 and 103) that had me laughing ruefully and shaking my head. The host gets a scam call saying, "your icloud account is compromised, don't use your computer, call us back on this number....". It is the sort of scammy call that we ignore; those who call back are conned into paying a few hundred dollars for a bogus anti-virus subscription. Well, this host called back and doggedly pursued these scammers, going so far as to travel to Delhi to talk to them. Crazy story. 

Let me know if you have podcast recommendations!